TWENTY-TWO

The Legend of the Laffites

For him they raise not the recording stone—
His death yet dubious, deeds too widely known;
He left a Corsair's name to other times,
Link'd with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.

PIRACY DID ENJOY a brief resurgence after Jean's death. In April 1824 even Colombian naval privateers, especially Beluche and his General Bolivar, were aiding in the suppression of Cuban pirates.¹ By the summer the corsairs were attacking everything that passed. Those claiming to be privateers took Spanish ships; those who were outright pirates robbed everyone, and it became all but impossible to tell the difference. Reports from Cuba in July said that scarcely a vessel came into Havana without being stopped and plundered by one or the other.² By October the reassertion of the pirates was such that Secretary of State Adams received a caution that "the temporary cessation of piracies some time before, caused by the presence of a large force on the coast, seems to have induced a delusive and fatal opinion, that the evil was extinguished."³

It was a bubble, however, for by 1825 piracy was all but finished, especially since Spanish merchantmen were now arming heavily. The few remaining privateers in the now-independent Latin American republics were decommissioned, and the governments stopped issuing letters of marque. With the new nations at peace with the rest of the world, Spanish commerce was no longer a legitimate target by any definition and there was no remaining pretext for privateering against anyone else. The pressure against outright piracy soon ended it altogether.

Thus the Laffites' trade survived them by barely two years. Had they outlived their occupation, there is little to suggest they could have adapted to another one. Smuggling died out on the United States Gulf coast thanks to falling tariff rates, and when rates went up again dramatically in 1828, smuggling did not return. Pierre had been a merchant many years before, of course, and perhaps the brothers could have gone completely legitimate, but the rise in tariff rates would have hurt them. Filibustering was dead, and though Americans were starting to pour into Texas as sanctioned settlers, neither Laffite had ever owned a piece of ground to plant. Slave smuggling still had some life in Louisiana and Texas, though Mexican authorities would try several expedients to keep slavery in Texas to a minimum, and in any case, no more Spanish slave ships could be taken legitimately. In short, the brothers would have been frozen out on almost every front. The world they had known and in which they could hope to flourish had left them behind, and the new world of the Gulf simply had no room for their kind.

The obscurity in which the Laffites died naturally gave rise to uncertainty. Stories of Pierre's demise got back to Texas in the 1830s and continued to appear thereafter, but since the popular imagination never seized upon him as it did his brother, less time was spent imagining his death. One story did surface that he was privateering with José Gaspar in the spring of 1822, some months after his actual death, and had been caught in a British trap that resulted in Gaspar's suicide and the sinking of Pierre's vessel.⁴ Yet in the main, it was his brother about whom everyone wanted to know. Only the dimmest echoes of Jean's death reached the United States, however, and no American journal picked up his obituary from the Bogotá Gaceta. Speculation and eventually fantasy filled the void. Eyebrows in South Carolina rose briefly when a "Captain Lafitte" stepped off the brig Mary from Havana in 1827, though he was too young to have been either of the corsairs. By 1840, as Laffite stories began to be told in growing volume in taverns and on decks along the Gulf coast, some doubted that he was dead.⁵ In Galveston that year some men who claimed to have known him said they believed he still lived.⁶ Other stories emerged that the absence of definitive word of Jean's death was proof that, ashamed of his past crimes, he had changed his name and profession after leaving Galveston and begun a new life.⁷ As if to prove this, in 1842 a Texan traveling in upstate New York met a man who told him that Jean had been a native of Orange County and returned there after leaving Galveston to live incognito as a farmer.⁸

Most assumed Jean was dead, though. In 1843 Texan founding father Mirabeau B. Lamar began looking into the Laffite stories and concluded that there were no authentic records of the pirate's death but that he could be assumed to be no longer living. The British visitor William Bollaert, who spent some time at Galveston in the early 1840s, also concluded that Jean was almost surely dead "not many years since, in poor circumstances."⁹ This still left room for imagination in accounting for his last years. One rumor held that Laffite was killed by his own men after they left Galveston.¹⁰ Others knew with certainty that Jean Laffite had succeeded in rescuing Napoleon from St. Helena, and the two of them lived and died in Louisiana, being buried at the Temple. Laffite and Napoleon were cousins, and Jean's uncle John Paul Jones was also buried with them. Laffite, in fact, had fought with Jones on the Bonhomme Richard when she defeated the British Serapis in 1778, about three years before Jean was born.¹¹ Laffite's death in 1823 would have surprised the distinguished Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth, father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. Playing Hamlet in Natchez, Mississippi, he went to the seamier part of town by the riverside and there met a dark stranger who robbed him. It was Jean Laffite. Twenty years later Booth was in New Orleans, where he received a summons from Jean, who was then in jail awaiting hanging. Remorseful over robbing the actor so long before, and aware that his days were at an end, Laffite told Booth that he wanted Booth to have his skull after his death. For the rest of his career, whenever Booth played the troubled prince of Denmark and raised from the grave the skull of "poor Yorick," it was the corsair's skull in his hand. ¹²

The Laffites' old friends and associates escaped the mythmaking that dogged the brothers, but in other regards time was little better to them. Of most of their men, Bollaert found in 1840 that "they could not very well go back into the world again, but they will all soon be dead."¹³ Laurent Maire, who gave up privateering before the fall of Galveston, never achieved much wealth as a city merchant, though he could afford a few slaves for himself and his wife, Adeline Godon.¹⁴ He lived in a rented house on Peace Street in the Faubourg Marigny, hardly a fashionable address for a white merchant, and when he died in 1827, leaving three minor children, all his worldly possessions came to $2,475, the bulk of it five slaves valued at $2,150. One of them had run away, and another would escape before the estate auction. His household goods—some old clothes, a canopy bed, six chairs, two tables, a mirror, and an armoire—together were worth $40.¹⁵ His widow would survive him by seventy years, and live to be 103, later telling stories of her late husband, the "wealthy planter."

Dominique, who never learned to read or write or sign his name, gave up the sea and privateering entirely by 1823, and took a modest home in the Faubourg Marigny.¹⁶ In his last years he became something of a local character. When he died on the morning of November 15, he was destitute and had to be buried on the charity of the city. People remembered "Captain Dominique" as a man "to whom fortune had never been very favorable." ¹⁷ Pierre's sometime partner in slave sales Antoine Abat lived only two years beyond Dominique. Only Beluche prospered to some extent. He owned several properties in New Orleans, but he left the city to serve under Bolivar and never came back. His wife would die days before the state legislature granted her a divorce on grounds of abandonment, while he lived in South America until his death in 1860. He, at least, ended his days an honored man of influence.¹⁸

Time erased most physical signs of the Laffites' passing. Nothing remained of the warehouses at Barataria even in their lifetime. By 1835 a traveler passing through the hamlet of Deweyville, Texas, saw only an old ruined shed when locals pointed out the remains of "one of Lafitte's old stations" where slaves were kept on the west bank of the Sabine.¹⁹ Four years later on Galveston only a few little hillocks revealed where the brothers' community had stood. The bleached ribs of an old hull on the beach were commonly mistaken for the remains of one of their vessels, though more likely it was the Constitution, that last prize brought in by the Minerva. Now seacoasters living nearby dismantled what was left for firewood.²⁰ The curious who visited Galveston in the 1830s and 1840s were directed to old characters such as James Campbell, John Lambert, Stephen Churchill, Ben Dolivar, and others who claimed to have served under the brothers.²¹ When the USS Jackall made a stop on Mugeres in 1824 seeking pirates, she found none, and no sign of them having been there. Local Indians said none had called since early 1822.²²

As for the remains of the Laffites, Jean's became a part of the Caribbean, and as early as 1840 no one could or would point out Pierre's grave at Dzilam de Bravo. An old woman said to have been Lucia Allen's servant supposedly knew the place, but she was habitually too drunk to show anyone.²³ More than a century later, visitors to Dzilam de Bravo heard the story of Pierre's burial and began searching for a marker in the cemetery. Finding nothing, someone in 1948 erected a wooden cross where lore said an earlier marker had been placed. On the marker the letters tte had been legible before a hurricane washed over the cemetery and obliterated the site of the tomb. Of course if there had been such a vestige on a marker, it misspelled the brothers' name. Now, in the eternal conflation of the brothers, those setting the wooden cross carved Jean's name into it rather than Pierre's. By 1960, when locals decided to erect a marble monument to Dzilam de Bravo's most famous recumbent resident, it was commonly assumed to be Jean who lay there somewhere.²⁴

In an era fed on Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and the poetry of Lord Byron, romantic notions of corsairs were a fixed part of popular culture, and the Laffites were well cast to fill the role. Novelists and writers of serial romances for the press seized upon Jean Laffite as a vehicle for their formulaic potboilers. Almost every known aspect of the brothers' career became exaggerated. They and almost they alone would be given credit for saving New Orleans in 1815. The $1,000 reward that Jean jokingly offered for Claiborne grew until by 1839 it was 10,000 British pounds, the episode dated to before the American Revolution. Stories had Jean leaving Galveston to set up his operation in Barataria rather than the other way round.²⁵

Probably the first novel appeared in 1826, only three years after Jean's death, when an author listed only as "Intruder Tar" published The Memoirs ofLafitte, or The Baratarian Pirate; A Narrative Founded on Fact, a fictional romance that went through at least six editions under different titles in book and serial form by 1836.²⁶ Then in 1829 an American newspaper made the erroneous connection between Jean Laffite and Byron's poem "The Corsair" that would ever after confuse readers. Charlotte Barnes hauled Jean out on stage in her play "La Fitte, the Pirate of the Gulf," which premiered at the Louisville Theatre in Kentucky on November 30, 1836, its author promising that her play was "founded upon the history of an extraordinary man." ²⁷ The previous year Joseph Holt Ingraham published a small edition of his two-volume novel The Pirate; or, Lafitte of the Gulph of Mexico, which in numerous subsequent editions became the grandfather of all future Laffite romances, increasingly removed from fact. By 1840 Jean Laffite was depicted as a fatal lothario with women, and a cold-blooded murderer of men who yet observed some forms of honor.²⁸ Everything from hatred of Spain, to unrequited love, to simple bloodlust had driven him to be a corsair. "I like blood," one author had him declare before taking a prize and slaying its crew.²⁹

Hand in hand with the romances went the stories of lost and buried treasure. The prosaic reality is that pirates and privateers lived hand to mouth, were improvident when they had money, and kept plying their trade because they saved none. Pierre Laffite had been bankrupt at least once and in almost constant legal difficulty over debt and disputed claims. The brothers together lost much in the 1818 hurricane, and they never did recover the $18,000 or more they spent on behalf of Spain. When they abandoned Galveston they had nothing more than their three ships, and soon lost one of those. When Pierre tried to raise new crewmen in Charleston, he offered to pay less than half the rate he had paid in New Orleans only two years before. When Englishman William Bollaert visited Galveston in 1840 and met with a few remnants of the Laffite days, one of them told him that "the Lafittes [meaning his men] squandered their money."³⁰

That did not stop the march of fantasy. Starting in the 1840s, Laffite treasure was known to be buried all along the Gulf coast from Barataria to Galveston, and every few years a new story appeared of a mysterious stranger who had more money than he should, or of clandestine diggings and lights in the darkness on the beaches. ³¹ Sometimes the searcher was one of the brothers' former companions. On one occasion it was Pierre Laffite himself, raised from the dead.³² Or one of the former associates, with his dying words, would reveal the whereabouts of chests of gold. Once the information came from a former slave of the Laffites,' complete with lurid tales of how "Marse Lafitte, when he bury dat money, kilt a nigger and put him in de hole too."³³ In 1853 Jean Laffite manifested himself at a séance at Galveston, and promised to lead astonished participants to the hiding place of some of his treasure, though they never seemed to have found it.³⁴

In 1875 there came a report that someone had found $75,000 off Bayou La Battre.³⁵ Others said that Jean—it was nearly always Jean—built a brick vault on the Calcasieu and hid a fortune there.³⁶ In 1878 a seventy-eight-year-old man in Galveston called "Crazy Ben" Dolivar, supposedly known to produce antique gold coins from time to time to buy his drink, suddenly disappeared with a nephew of Jean Laffite after revealing to him the location of Laffite's treasure.³⁷ Six years later one editor was so perplexed by the plethora of treasure stories that he wondered that "one would suppose that this idea of Laffite's having buried treasure promiscuously about in every odd looking spot, would exist only with ignorant and superstitious persons," whereas "men of known good sense have been drawn in this foolish search." More than that, said the editor, "the whole truth is, that Laffite never had any treasure at all." Those looking for it, like those seeking the secret of perpetual motion, "will founder on the banks of insanity."³⁸

Still men looked for the treasure, and inevitably criminals capitalized on the lure, as in 1909 when Joseph Choate swindled $10,000 from gullible investors by claiming to know the cave near Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Laffite's treasure lay hidden. He never found the money, of course, but did discover a six-year prison sentence for fraud.³⁹ Then in 1936 a woman revealed that Laffite sank his treasure ship in the Trinity River, and only she and her father knew where. They had known for fifty years, but never got around to recovering the gold they knew to be aboard, which was why they could not reveal its location. ⁴⁰ But, no, in 1981 Laffite's treasure had moved to Cameron, Louisiana. Not so, said others twenty years later, who knew it to be back at Lake Charles.⁴¹ Laffite's gold even had magical powers, as Captain J. E. Fehann could attest. He had sailed on a vessel with the unfortunate name the Miasma, whose captain was a descendant of a man who had served the Laffites, and always wore around his neck a gold doubloon given him by Jean. It gave him good luck at sea. If ever a storm arose, he said, he had merely to touch the coin to the mainmast and say, "Jean LaFitte banish this wind," and the storm went away. Fehann saw it work in a Caribbean squall when a quarter of an hour after the words were spoken, the storm abated.⁴²

Through all the myth and legend, Americans were trying to settle for themselves the place of the Laffites in their history and their folk pantheon. One thing is certain. The brothers were emblems of their time and place. Throughout the settlement of North America, there always appeared at the latest fringe of civilization a species of entrepreneur daring, resourceful, uninhibited by the restrictions of the scanty law available, and imaginative in devising means to get around even those. Once Americans established independence and pursued their inexorable spread westward, the numbers of such men exploded with the dramatically expanding opportunity. Wherever there was a borderland beyond the efficient imposition of the law, they appeared. Wherever there was a population with a need not adequately supplied by conventional means of commerce, they flourished. And once the vacuum of laws and regulation was filled, they disappeared and moved on, unable and unwilling to adapt to existence in the new environment. This was the story of Samuel Mason and the famed "land pirates" of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the early 1800s, the story of James Bowie and his phenomenal land frauds in Louisiana and Arkansas in the 1820s, and the story of the Laffites and the Gulf corsairs. They could not have appeared at any other time or place in America's story, and when the conjunctions of history that created them disappeared, so did they.

Judged by the measure of their achievements, the Laffites were men of temporal success but lifetime failure. First from smuggling, then from privateering and piracy, they often took in large sums of money, and nothing suggests that either entertained any higher ambition. Yet like virtually all of the men in their trades, they kept little for very long, neither did they use their gains to acquire or establish anything lasting. They were chancers who lived for the moment. As for their influence on the course of filibustering efforts to wrest New World colonies from the grip of Spain, none of the enterprises that they supported succeeded, and none of those that failed once the Laffites began to work for Spain owed their demise to the brothers' schemes. Like the filibusters and their opponents, none of them individually, nor the lot of them as a whole, exerted any decisive influence on the revolutionary movements in Latin America or the fate of Texas. While the committed native revolutionaries like Bolivar and San Martin succeeded, Gutiérrez, Humbert, Toledo, Picornell, Aury, Lallemand, Long, and all the other opportunistic "patriots" failed. The damage the corsairs did to Spanish shipping was never enough to keep Spanish merchantmen off the Gulf and Caribbean, or to make the difference in Spain finally losing its New World colonies.

Of course the Laffites represented a special case among their brethren. If their first loyalty was to themselves, still as smugglers and privateers they proved more principled than the rest, solicitous of life, loyal to friends, and operating according to ethical values that often seemed out of place amid a thicket of thieves. Thus it is ironic that one of the earliest stories told of them, one that appeared in print while they were yet living, portrayed them as murderously bloodthirsty. A story appeared in New Orleans the same month as Jean's abandonment of Galveston that told of a passenger ship bound from New Orleans to France in 1812. A wealthy French lady was among those aboard, and word of the riches with which she traveled reached the corsairs. The ship vanished and nothing was ever heard of it or its passengers, but months later the daughter of the affluent woman was stunned while walking on a New Orleans street to see her mother's jewelry around the neck of Marie Villard. Pierre Laffite indignantly denied any involvement in the disappearance of the ship, and claimed he won the baubles at cards with his associates at Barataria. That the story first appeared immediately after the near panic in New Orleans and the temporary reprieve of Desfarges and Johnson's associates is hardly coincidental. It is certainly a myth, though one that would crop up in Laffite novels, plays, and romances for more than a century. ⁴³

Beyond their lack of bloodlust, they showed the skills to create and build, even if only for purposes of exploitation. First the Barataria community, and then the commune at Galveston, revealed that they had the organizational sense and the personal presence to establish and govern their rough associates, and to conceive and manage an enterprise directed toward the greater and more efficient profit of all. Most of the pirate communities of the world operated in some degree as egalitarian enterprises in which leaders ruled—to the degree that they governed at all—by common consent rather than election, and only after they had demonstrated an ability to take command and direct for the mutual benefit.

The community had to take care of its own. Every man on a ship that took a prize was entitled to a share regardless of his role in the taking, and when a man suffered a serious or disabling injury, he was entitled to something extra from the commonweal to compensate him for his loss. It was not a "social safety net," but the men who sailed the Laffite vessels out of Galveston did have by right a degree of welfare protection not yet known to ordinary workers. And they recognized the irony that a community of thieves could only flourish by adhering to its own body of laws, laws that the Laffites enforced even to the death. Certainly this is how the Laffites rose to authority among the corsairs for whom they provided a service, and their service was as vertical as that of the largest corporation, from supplying letters of marque to sail under and the ships to take prizes, to providing a port to receive prize goods, and then the means to get the goods to market.

That the scheme did not always work perfectly, or that it did not work for long, takes nothing away from the novelty and magnitude of the Laffites' conception. Their place lies in a portrait of motives and attempts, not lasting achievements. In the end, the importance of the Laffites and the corsairs lies in the impact they had on Americans' perceptions of their country in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in their attitude toward just who had the right to capitalize on the bounty of the hemisphere, and on the development of nascent Manifest Destiny west of the Mississippi. In an era when dreams were limited only by the size of men's imaginations, the Laffites dreamed large.

In the larger realm of loyalties removed from potential profit, however, the brothers remain an enigma. As spies they were never motivated by more than the hope of gain, of which Jean's final service privateering against Spanish ships after Spain had dispensed with the brothers' services is proof enough. Neither can self-interest be removed from their aid to Claiborne and Jackson at New Orleans. Theirs was a patriotism limited by convenience, and when maintaining a connection to the United States had no further benefit to them, no bonds of sympathy or loyalty held them. Real patriots would have changed profession to remain Americans. The Laffites preferred to remain corsairs and become citizens of the sea.

In the city they had once helped to save, two sisters and several children either waited in hope for the return of the brothers Laffite or else swallowed grief at their abandonment and got on about the business of living. Accurate word of the time and manner of Jean's death may never have come to Catherine, and there is no telling how long it took for news of Pierre's passing to find its way to Marie Villard. George Schumph may never have set foot in Louisiana again after he left Yucatán. Most probably the news came by word of mouth, perhaps via Jean before his own last fight, or from rumors picked up by merchant visitors to Campeche and Cartagena. All that can be said with certainty is that Marie Villard knew or assumed her lover was dead by March 19, 1825, when the marriage record of their daughter Catherine Coralie Laffite listed the father of the bride as "Pierre, dec[eased]."⁴⁴

Marie Louise Villard lived on in the Faubourg Marigny. She was still there in the 1830s, living on Bagatelle Street between Esplanade and the Canal Marigny, with her daughter Rose and two of her surviving younger sons, probably Jean and Joseph.⁴⁵ By that time her other children by Pierre had gone on to varying fortunes. In 1833 Rose Laffite married the son of the owner of the St. Philip Street Ballroom, the free mulatto André Tessier, and began several generations of a large family.⁴⁶ Pierre's son Martin Firmin Laffite married the mulattress Silvania Catherina Brunetti on April 14, 1828, but he died within a few years, before they could begin a family, and she remarried.⁴⁷ Her father Francisco Brunetti was a merchant in New Orleans and an occasional associate of the Laffites.⁴⁸ He had been one of Sedeñas couriers to Havana, and was robbed at sea by Aury in 1817. He regularly traveled to Campeche as late as 1820, perhaps still doing a little business with the Laffites.

Catherine Coralie Laffite married the mulatto Pierre Roup of San Domingue, a man of prominence in the free black community, a Masonic leader who founded Perseverance Lodge #4, and in time became a prosperous builder who erected several fine houses on Rampart and Esplanade streets. ⁴⁹ She may even have maintained a connection to that possible earlier liaison of Pierre's with Adelaide Maseleri. The surname existed in a bewildering variety of at least forty-five spellings, one of them being Demasilieres, and in 1825 a Catherina Laffit, probably this same Catherine Coralie Laffite, was godmother at the baptism of Marie Demasilieres.⁵⁰ Of Adelaide Maseleri's daughter Marie Josephe Laffite, however, not another trace remains.⁵¹ Of Pierre's sons Joseph, Jean, Pierre, and/or the possibly mythical Eugene, no definitive trace was left after 1830. The elder may have gone with Pierre to Mugeres. The younger could have succumbed to the annual fevers. They may simply have merged into the growing population of Laffites of all spellings and other blood, and disappeared through the documentary cracks.

As for their mother, sometime before her death on October 27, 1833, at forty-eight, Marie married or took another common-law husband named Ramos, probably the father of Feliciano Ramos.⁵² Her family buried her in the St. Louis Cemetery Number 2.⁵³ Her sister Catarina or Catherine Villard lived on another quarter century and somehow kept much of the family together. By August 1850 she resided in the Faubourg Marigny, and P. Ramos, probably Marie's last mate, lived with her. In the same household lived Adele Laffite, born in 1819 and probably a daughter of Jean's or Pierre's, and several of Catherine's children, including two by Feliciano Ramos. Next door lived Marie's daughter Coralie Laffite Roup and one of her sons, as well as a young man named Alexandre Laffite whose relation to the family is unclear.⁵⁴ Catherine lived on, never marrying, until she died, aged about sixty-five, on July 2, 1858.⁵⁵ Years before she had buried Jean Laffite's only known son, Jean Pierre Laffite, who died during an epidemic in October 1832.⁵⁶

The children of Pierre Laffite lived quietly. Indeed, within two generations his descendants had different surnames, thanks largely to the fact that only his daughters Rose and Coralie, and his possible daughter Adele, seem to have had children. Even in the close-knit free black community where they lived, their connection with the famous pirates passed into hearsay. By 1863 a rumor said a Laffite daughter was still living in New Orleans. Catherine Roup had died on July 22, 1855, aged about fifty.⁵⁷ Adele Laffite Grant Ramos was still alive, however, as were most of her nine children, and Rose Laffite Tessier lived until November 10, 1870.⁵⁸

Rose and her husband André Tessier lived on Esplanade, and raised at least five children.⁵⁹ Pierre Laffite had left little behind for them to remember him by. His name disappeared when his daughters married, and none of his grandchildren bore it. All that remained in the family by way of mementos were a buckle and a small cross said to have been Pierre's, though they were probably Tessier's.⁶⁰

One thing that Pierre Laffite undeniably left to his progeny, however, was his white skin. Though sometimes referred to as "colored," Marie Villard was almost certainly a mulatto, meaning that in the mathematics of blood, her children with Pierre were three-fourths white and one-quarter black. In the equations of race in Louisiana at that time, however, they were colored before the law if they had a single drop of Negro blood in their veins. They could not vote or hold office, enlist in military service, marry whites, or enjoy a number of other privileges, and the records to establish their legal race were several, including the birth, marriage, and death certificates required in the city, as well as the baptismal, marriage, and funeral records in the Sacramental Archives of the Cathedral Church of St. Louis. Thus the baptisms of the children of Pierre and Jean Laffite were recorded in the sacramental books for free blacks and slaves.

But they had white blood, and like thousands of other mixed-race free people in the city, their skin was lighter than that of full-blooded blacks, and their features more Caucasian. With each succeeding generation, as they married or cohabited with other mulattoes or quadroons, they became more and more white to all appearances. All of Rose and André Tessier's children were recorded as "colored" at the registration of their births.⁶¹ Their daughter Laura Emilie probably married Auguste Allnet around 1860, and gave birth to five children who grew to adulthood, and their birth and death certificates listed them, too, as "colored." But then in 1880 came the census enumerator, and when he called at the Allnet home on Marais Street in New Orleans, its inhabitants told him they were "white" and what he saw did not raise any question in his mind.⁶² Pierre's descendants had commenced the risky business of "passing."

On June 14, 1890, Auguste and Laura Emilie's son Edward Andrew Allnet married a white woman, Bertha Eugenie Emuy, and soon they began a family.⁶³ In the office of vital statistics, every one of their children would be registered as "white" at birth.⁶⁴ Laura Emilie's sister Alexandrine did the same thing after she married a white Canadian merchant, Edward Farr. The husband had to know of his wife's dollop of black blood, for at least two of their four children listed their own children as colored at birth. Their oldest son, Edward Robert Louis Farr, would have nine children by his wife, Marie Lacoste. Two of them were listed as colored, another as white, and no race at all was given for the rest, meaning a presumption that they were white.

One of Edward and Marie's children listed as colored at birth was their daughter Alexandrine Mirielle, born December 23, 1891.⁶⁵ When she married a white man, George Renton, on March 18, 1911, the family was actively passing as white. As part of the subterfuge, the Farrs told Renton of the several vital records on file in the city and with the cathedral, and explained that they were the result of errors and carelessness, which he seemed to accept. Unfortunately something happened that they could not have anticipated. Renton turned out to he a brute. He abused Mirielle, and, according to her, he "contracted loathsome venereal diseases as a result of his promiscuous adulteries." After four years she left him and moved herself and their furniture into her parents' home. ⁶⁶

An angry and vengeful Renton filed for an annulment on October 1, 1915, claiming that he had just learned that his wife had colored blood, making their marriage illegal and she and her family deceivers. A divorce entitled her to a half share of their joint property, whereas an annulment would mean that all property he purchased for them while together remained lawfully his. It came down to parlor furniture, a dining room set, a china closet, a gas stove, clocks, pictures, and even "bric-a-brac" that he had no intention of sharing with the woman who rejected him.⁶⁷

The ensuing legal fight lasted over a decade, turning first to last on the composition of Mirielle's blood. The question went far beyond the matter of divorce or annulment, for if she were adjudged to be colored, then so were all her family. They stood to lose voting rights, legal rights, what social status they had as members of the white working community, and perhaps even their employment. The outcome could be catastrophic for scores of aunts, uncles, and cousins. It all hinged on the documents, and soon archivists appeared in the district court carrying a mountain of certified copies of birth, marriage, and death certificates from the city archives, while the custodian of the Sacramental Archives produced the baptismal books going back to the late 1700s.

The family's case rested on one essential claim.⁶⁸ Marie Louise Villard was not their ancestor. Rather, Pierre Laffite had married a white woman, Marie Delas, and Rose Laffite was her daughter. That left the problem of the marriage record of Rose Laffite and André Tessier, which was recorded in a book of marriages of free blacks and showed both Rose and her husband to be mulattoes. The solution was one to which other "passing" New Orleanians had resorted—vandalizing the cathedral records. Sometime shortly after the first suit was filed, if not before, a member of Mirielle's family went into the cathedral archives, which were open to the public, and pulled out part one of the second volume of Marriages of Free Persons of Color for the years 1830 to 1835. The index clearly referenced the Tessier-Laffite marriage on page thirty-five.

A careful slash with a penknife removed the page with the offending record. Showing some forethought, the vandal cut out the index page, too, and inserted in its place a duplicate on which was listed every reference from the removed index page but that to the Tessier-Laffite marriage on page thirty-five. It seemed very clever, but not quite clever enough. For a start, the new index page was obviously a different paper from the rest of the volume, and the entries in a different hand. More careless than that, the vandal did not notice that it was a double entry index, meaning that every marriage was listed twice, once under each surname involved. The page with a reference under Tessier was taken out, but the vandal overlooked the page with the reference listed under Laffite. No one would be fooled, and no one was. When the archivist began gathering the records in December 1915 for the Renton case, he immediately saw what had been done.⁶⁹

Several members of the family filed a joint suit against the New Orleans Board of Health to have the vital statistics records declared void, claiming that court clerks and undertakers, and everyone else who filled out the forms, either made mistakes or perpetuated an earlier error. The archivists testified to the story contained in their records, however, and the trail back to Marie Villard became indelibly clear, while none at all could be established to Marie Delas. Other embarrassing revelations unwittingly came out, as in the discovery that Mirielle's grandfather Edward Farr had had a mulatto mistress, and several children born to her, all recorded as colored. ⁷⁰

The family did not deny that their ancestor Pierre Laffite was the pirate and smuggler of Barataria, though their testimony revealed that after the passage of only three generations, they knew virtually nothing more about him. One, Rosalie DuHart, could only say that her mother told her "he was a pirate."⁷¹ Horace Farr recalled in May 1921 that "we always spoke about Pierre Lafitte and the family," and that "[his] being a pirate, I was interested in knowing his life."⁷² Edward Allnet, who led the descendants in their suit against the Board of Health, could only recall his mother Laura Emilie speaking vaguely of the grandfather she never knew as a wandering man. "He never stopped," her mother Rose had told her, but was "always on the go." When she saw her son Edward showing a penchant for travel, she chided him that he was "another one [who] will come out just like Pierre Lafitte." In her motherly jibes there was a sad echo of very different emotions suffered by her grandmother Marie Villard when she teased that Edward was "another one like Pierre Lafitte, gone away and don't know when he will come back."⁷³

There was another Pierre Lafitte, of course, as indeed there were several in early New Orleans. He, too, was from Bordeaux, and the cathedral archives revealed that he and a Jeanne Delas had a son Pierre born about 1800. On December 16, 1820, the son married Marie Berret, and both his mother and his wife were certainly white. However, in their court pleadings the family never made any attempt by documents to prove a link between these Laffites and their ancestress Rose. They could not. In all probability, the idea of claiming Delas as an ancestor came to them when they started tracing the documentation at the cathedral on their genuine ancestry and serendipitously chanced upon a Pierre Lafitte with a different spelling of the name but with a wife conveniently white.

The assertion that Pierre married a Delas—they were confused as to whether her name was Marie or Jeanne, a result of conflating the records of Pierre Lafitte and Jeanne Delas with those of the couple's son Pierre and his wife Marie Berret—was attributed to Rose Laffite. Rose's daughter Alexandrine Farr so claimed in a statement taken in 1918, and she also said that Rose had only one sibling, a Pierre Laffite who went to France, then returned to New Orleans to marry.⁷⁴ Testimony was introduced from an elderly woman who had known Rose Laffite Tessier in her last years in the 1860s, and who said she recalled Rose talking about her father as "this man Lafitte," and saying that her mother had been French, which, of course, applied to Marie Villard's background as well as that of any Delas.⁷⁵ Three years later Rosalie DuHart, daughter of Emilie Louise Tessier, repeated the claim that Rose Laffite said her mother was Marie Delas. She also produced the buckle and the cross in the hope that they provided some sort of evidence, claiming that Pierre had given them to Rose, but then her testimony made it clear that they came from her grandfather Tessier's family. It was hinted that the "D" in the initials "C. D." on the cross stood for Delas, but again DuHart compromised her own testimony when she went on to say that she had put the initials on the cross herself.⁷⁶

In the end the testimony went on for months, and filled more than five hundred pages of transcripts, none of it convincing anyone that there had been official errors. It was a sad tableau of a working-class family fighting to retain what position they had in their community and society, and they were bound to lose. There had been a number of similar cases in recent years, and the unusually complete vital records kept in New Orleans since early in the past century defeated most of them. Renton got his annulment, and in November 1922 the court handed down the inevitable decision in the suit against the Board of Health.⁷⁷ Mirielle responded in December by filing for a divorce, but it was a hopeless effort, especially after her family appealed the lower court's decision in their suit to the state supreme court, alleging that it came under that bench's purview due to the damages that the family would suffer to their political rights as a result of being adjudged to be of colored blood. On March 10, 1924, the Supreme Court heard arguments, but quickly declined to hear the case or consider overturning the lower court's ruling. ⁷⁸ In November 1925, giving up all hope, Mirielle filed a motion to withdraw her petition for a divorce, and at last, almost exactly ten years after her legal nightmare began, it was all over.⁷⁹

The family were devastated. For those living out of the state, as many did, it was not so bad, but for those in New Orleans there was no hiding the sudden change in their status. Mirielle Renton went back to being Mirielle Farr, an embittered woman who soon disappeared from New Orleans, doing her best to keep herself and her ancestry a secret.⁸⁰ Only after the turn of the millennium would descendants of Pierre and Marie begin to emerge once more from the shadows imposed on them by the mores and prejudices of a distant time. Thus, in a last, sad, irony, when the Laffites disappeared into the Gulf, they were forgotten by their own family just as, apparently, they forgot that family themselves. Instead, as the generations ensued, their descendants preferred to remember their ancestress Marie as the white Delas rather than the mulatto Villard who had held the family together when her man went away and did not return. As for memories of the Laffites themselves, of Jean not a jot of recall survived in the family, and of Pierre little more than that he was a pirate and a vagabond.

There was one thing more, though: vague stories redolent of adventure and mystery all conjured by the name of a place. Asked what Rose told her of her grandfather Pierre Lafitte, Alexandrine Farr could summon only a single ancient recollection that "my mother often spoke to me of Bayou Barataria."⁸¹